Distributed Objects: Meaning and Mattering after Alfred Gell

One of the most influential anthropological works of the last two decades, Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency is a provocative and ambitious work that both challenged and reshaped anthropological understandings of art, agency, creativity and the social. It has become a touchstone in contemporary artifact-based scholarship. This volume brings together leading anthropologists, archaeologists, art historians and other scholars into an interdisciplinary dialogue with Art and Agency, generating a timely re-engagement with the themes, issues and arguments at the heart of Gell’s work, which remains salient, and controversial, in the social sciences and humanities. Extending his theory into new territory – from music to literary technology and ontology to technological change – the contributors do not simply take stock, but also provoke, critically reassessing this important work while using it to challenge conceptual and disciplinary boundaries.

Liana Chua is Lecturer in Anthropology at Brunel University London. She works on conversion to Christianity, ethnic citizenship, landscape, resettlement and conservation in Malaysian Borneo, and on artifact-oriented theory and museology more broadly. She is the author of The Christianity of Culture: Conversion, Ethnic Citizenship, and the Matter of Religion in Malaysian Borneo (2012).

Mark Elliott is Senior Curator for Anthropology at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge. Trained as an anthropologist, he now works across archaeological and ethnographic collections, and was co-curator, with Anita Herle and Rebecca Empson, of Assembling Bodies: Art, Science & Imagination (2009-10). His research and teaching interests include histories of museum practice in South Asia and Britain, and visual and material representations of Adivasi peoples in India.